Comparing WebM And H.264

Jan Ozer, writing on Streamingmedia.com has carried out some in-depth testing of the Google supported WebM and H.264 video codecs:

“This article compares H.264 to WebM, Google’s implementation of the VP8 codec, using three variables, encoding time, compressed quality and CPU requirements for playback on three personal computers. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of the results: Using Sorenson Squeeze to produce both H.264 and WebM, the latter definitely took longer, but there are techniques that you can use to reduce the spread to under 25%, which is pretty much irrelevant. Though H.264 offers slightly higher quality than the VP8 codec used by WebM using the aggressive (e.g. very low data rate) parameters that I tested, at normal web parameters, you couldn’t tell the difference without a scorecard. Even as compared to H.264 files produces with x264, VP8 holds its own.” [Read More]